Thanksgiving 2018

While Thanksgiving is a national holiday, it is not part of the liturgical calendar. That being said, gathering, sharing stories, eating meals, and saying farewell knowing you’re surrounded by love are certainly reminiscent of the order of worship. Figuring out how to mark the day well can be a challenge.

I remember when I figured out that Thanksgiving has a complicated history. Maybe you do too. It was uncomfortable pealing back the layers of the stories I’d received to find that the story received by my grade school classmate, Niquita, a Native American, was not the same. Peace was not lasting and colonization was not a gift to the people being colonized. It took a few years to reconcile that remembering that part of the story could also happen on a day of giving thanks.

Blessings, like grace, are gifts from God that we don’t earn but are given that we might be a blessing to others. That last bit could be received as a moral “ought” or some sort of duty, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s a natural outpouring if we get the first bit. Thanksgiving can be about developing practices to better understand blessings in order to inspire good conversation and action toward the second bit.